


You Never Knew

by TUNiU



Series: Victor [3]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: POV Second Person, Uncharted 4, uncharted 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 13:10:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18366677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TUNiU/pseuds/TUNiU
Summary: Victor Sullivan never knew Nathan had a brother until one day, Nathan tried to run away back to Cartagena.





	You Never Knew

**Author's Note:**

> This was so difficult to get out. It doesn't feel right. In UC 4, Sam complains to Nathan about them using Victor as their way into the auction. Why would Sam not trust Victor, if he had known him all those years before Panama. We know that for however long it was, Victor kinda raised Nathan, and a beautiful trust was built. But where was Sam? Why doesn't Sam have that relationship with Victor as well.

You've known Nathan Drake for a whole year, (taught him everything you know, you're so goddamn proud of him) when he tries to leave you in the middle of the night. If you hadn't woken in the night to piss, you wouldn't have heard his motel door open, you wouldn't have walked out of your room to check and you wouldn't have seen him break into a car and start hot wiring it (it takes him under a minute, just like you taught him, so goddamm proud).

The near miss will haunt you for years. He would have disappeared in under a minute and you would never have seen him again. (You love this boy so much.) But you see his head duck under the console, because he still can't fix the wires by feel, yet, but he's getting better.

"Nathan?" you call to him and he looks up at you in fear and shame.

He doesn't start the car. He's far enough from you that if he started the car and sped away you couldn't run to catch him fast enough. He stops what he's doing and gets out. He's wearing that red and white ringer shirt you met him in, though it's too small for him now (now that you've fed him up right he's hit a growth spurt he might have missed as a street urchin), and he has his satchel, but it’s hanging too light on his shoulders, and you just know the only thing in there is that white journal you've never been allowed to look inside. You know that if you opened his motel room door you would find everything you ever bought him left behind. For a moment, your heart breaks. Why is he so thoroughly trying to erase your influence on him?

His hands wring around the satchel strap across his chest. He can't look you in the eye. Was it something you did? Something you didn't? Whatever it is, you can see, he doesn't want to leave.

"Whatever has you spooked, we can fix it, Nate, together," you tell him softly. You don't want him to leave either, but you can't keep him. A man has a right to make his own fortune. And he is now, a man instead of a boy, even if he still isn't yet eighteen, (he's stolen and killed and gone to jail and can take care of himself.)

"I have to go," Nate says wretchedly and you can see the abandoned street urchin in his eyes.

A year of knowing Nathan Drake and you never knew he had a brother until now. A brother who is getting out of a Colombian prison in a few days and is expecting Nathan to be there. You will never remember exactly what you said to convince him to stay with you, but together you go back to the motel and pack all your stuff. You take him back to Cartagena and you drive him to the jail in time to meet his brother Sam walking out a free man.

However he went into jail, Samuel Drake comes out hard. You can see something in his eyes, like his perspective’s been turned inside out and any life outside prison is just a temporary situation.

You will never have the connection with Sam that you have with Nate. Not until after Sam returns from 15 years presumed dead in a Panamanian jail. By then, he's a conman as slick as they come (good enough to fool you and Nate with the spectre of Hector Alcazar). For now, he's an overprotective older brother, who spent over a year with hardened criminals who have nothing but time and a captive audience to tell their most horrific crimes, who thinks you've been making Nathan pay for your protection, pay with the only thing a penniless street urchin has.

You overhear them talking later that night. You've gotten separate motel rooms, like always, but the walls are thin and you can hear them arguing in the room next door. Sam offers to kill you for Nate. He begs to know just what you've made Nate do. You'd be impressed at the steel in his voice if he wasn't planning your murder.

Nate defends you, telling Sam that all you've ever asked of him is to learn, and be a protégé. But he doesn't have the right weight behind his words, he just sounds like a naive little kid (the kid he pretends to be when you have to play at being father and son). It's all true, you've never laid a bad hand on that boy, but Sam doesn't believe it. Of course not. He keeps an eye on you, always second guesses anything you ask them to do. He's a cocky little shit that thinks a year in prison makes him a man who knows everything he needs to know of the world. (It doesn't. It just stripped away his childhood.) He's cynical to a fault, to his own detriment. You never prove him right in his assumptions of you. There's a box marked 'Nate' in your mind and in another life, it would be marked 'son'.

Nate with his brother is a different person than without. The year you’ve spent teaching him and building trust is wiped away. You can’t ask him to do anything without him looking to Sam for approval. You’re being pushed out to the fringes and there’s nothing you can do (yes, there is, but not and remain the same man you are). Just as you are chafing at the dynamic, so is Sam, and one day he splits, off on some adventure he tells Nate is with a contact of a friend (he hasn't made any friends, he hasn’t left your company since the day he left prison). While you can’t agree with him leaving Nate, you’re glad of it too. If Sam wanted, he could have taken Nate with him, and you have no doubt Nate would go with his brother, and you would never see them again, and your life would be the poorer for it. Sam leaves, and leaves his brother behind in your care.

He keeps in touch with postcards, all ‘wish you were here’, cheap cards sent to your various post-office boxes. You never get them in the correct order, by the time Nate knows where he was, he’s already gone.

The millennium ends, and with it comes an influx of superstitious rich folk willing to pay ridiculous sums for random oogie-boogie whatsits to protect them against the end of the world and for a while business is very good for you and Nate.

Sam’s last postcard is from Panama, he writes that he found the trail of Henry Avery’s first mate in a local jail. The same Henry Avery that their mother wrote about in her journal, that same white journal Nate's always carrying, that he finally allowed you to read one day after too much drinking and too much boasting about the greatest pirate treasure of all time.

(You will never forget the look on Nate's face when he tells you Sam didn’t survive the jail escape.)

**Author's Note:**

> The fact that Nathan grew up in the 90s didn't hit me at first. I started playing UC 3 in 2019, so when the game says 20 years previously, I thought that meant Nathan and Sully met in 1999, so Nathan would have grown up in the 2000s. Nope, UC3 takes place in 2010. Which means I have no idea how treasure hunter con men would communicate without emails and burner phones.


End file.
